Monthly Archives: May 2017

Hello fellow humans! I hope you are well. My friend, colleague, and co-author Dr. Alexander Lee and I wrote a short opinion piece, “Re-coupling science and policy”, for the Daily Camera–a local Boulder newspaper–earlier this week.

This short piece is concurrent with the argument in another of our recent articles, “Two problems of climate change: Can we lose the planet but save ourselves?” published in the journal Ethics, Policy, & Environment. There, we argue that the variety of values-based claims central to the climate ethics discussion, from concern with the burdens of harmful climate impacts to the priority of rectifying the wrongdoing of climate change, are given disproportionate emphasis; most emphasis–we think problematically–is put on the harms-dimension of the climate problem, while we believe the latter is closer to the true heart of the immorality and unethical nature of anthropogenic climate change.

Science, as it were, is being de-coupled from the policymaking process. Why the decoupling? Because science, and our reliance on science in making decisions of public import, ultimately reflects the progressive values central to the age of reason, i.e. the value we place on collaboration, fostering open discourse among even and especially those who disagree, the importance of evidence, the approach of objectivity, the testability of hypotheses and reproducibility of methods, and the centrality of cooperation to social, political, and ethical progress; values which, I think rather clearly, the Trump Administration does not share. And thus its leaders have taken significant steps to decouple science from the policymaking and public decision-making process. Yet another sign that the age of reason is dead.

Decoupling science from the policymaking process is yet another move in the Trump Administration’s course to remove representatives of reason from the public discourse; the scheme to silence reasonable public discourse outright. As Alex and I argue, “silencing scientists silences values” — and the open consideration of values is indispensable to the march of progress. As progress in ethics and social order is non-linear, and certainly not guaranteed or immune to regress, we must be tireless in its defense. And to be sure, where science and values discourse alike are squelched by the Trump Administration, it’s not just the age of reasons that’s under siege — it is the very possibility of progress in society.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

Our regressive descent into mysticism and superstition has reached terminal velocity. Late capitalism and the Anthropocene have delivered us to a new medieval period of human history, coupled with a neo-feudal socioeconomic order and global klepto-plutocratic oligarchy.

Most have been deluded by radical progress in science and technology to believe that progress in ethics and social order is necessarily concurrent. Among the most delusional are those who remain ascribed to the leftist dogma that globalization and the worldwide liberation of human beings from the barbarity of the human condition are guaranteed. Progress in science and technology may be a fact but it is all the more evident now that inevitable progress in ethics, politics, and social order are a myth.

The rise of Trump, Brexit, and right-wing populism in western Europe are mere symptoms of the utopian and fundamentally unsustainable project of global neoliberalism and installing western-style democracy the world over. Even the bastions of liberal social order in Europe and North America are buckling under the pressures of globalization and the task of governing radically pluralistic society.

The political right many live in a fantasy of denial about the trajectory of diversity and demographics in Western culture, the science of climate change, and the possibility of sustaining the longstanding heteronormative, patriarchic, and anti-ecological social hierarchy amidst unprecedented pluralism, but the left is perhaps worse off in remaining faithful that human beings will universally “see the light” and reject the superstitions and prejudices that are seemingly inseparable from the rapacity and tribalism of human nature.

As isolationist plutocratic oligarchy becomes the new governmental norm of 21st century politics, there’s a little evidence to support that our gradual dissent into darkness will reverse course.

As Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition Project of Yale University have confirmed for years, people’s superstitions, values, and world views invariably precede their acceptance of empirical data that contradictions their predispositions. It’s simply easier to accept facts that confirm your worldview than to change one’s mind, potentially upending one’s sense of order and meaning in life. To accommodate our cognitive dissonance we rather pretend the world isn’t what it is. Instead of untangling the moral valence of scientific research in civic discourses, we prefer to silence them altogether—to silence scientific and ethical communication outright.

For years now our politics have been shrouded in mis-information about everything ranging from the ills of smoking cigarettes to the causes of human induced climate change. Merchants of Doubt have been among us for decades and now they remain among the only voices not silenced by the current US federal administration.

Some representatives of the scientific and progressive community have “gone rogue” on Twitter and remain dedicated to contesting the slew of falsehoods perpetuated by those with financial interests in the status quo of energy production, gender norms, and institutional oppression across races and genders and sexualities. But ultimately these outbursts of indignation will be consumed by the indiscernible din of hodgepodge identity politics and conflict among the elites and populists of the left.

The unwillingness of the political left and right to even engage in coherent civic discourse and has brought upon us the era of fake news and alternate facts. Rather than wrestle with truth, untangle the diversions of values and moral assumptions underlying our disagreements, and cooperate, we prefer to submerge ourselves in echo-chambers that make us comfortable and self-righteous, only reinforcing what we merely presume to be objective truth about the direction and order of the world.

It should come as no surprise that the challenges of experimenting with pluralistic society have culminated in the reemergence of intractable tribalism; tribes that refuse to even listen to one another. The age of reason worked while it did because discourse enabled constructive disagreement and ultimately collaboration, but our inability to be discursive about our treatises of ethics and social order evidences that for all our technoscientific progress, reason will succumb to the barbaric disposition of human beings to use the power of technology to wage war on ourselves and the non-human world alike rather than create a world without poverty, oppression, and ecological degradation.

We have abandoned our reasonable capacities to take responsibility for human agency in the world. Trump’s reinsertion of interest in torture; the reinstatement of black sites; the embrace of dictators from Putin to Assad; nuclear re-proliferation; the outright denial of human-caused climate change; the rapid backpedaling of progress in women’s, non-heterosexual, and non-cisgender rights; voter suppression; white nationalism; the retraction of US humanitarian aid around the world; the beginnings of mass deportation or internment of Mexicans and Muslims; and the refusal to accept political and climate refugees simply on the basis of their ethnicities and religions are the tip of the regressive iceberg. If anything, the rise of Trump demonstrates that the liberal progressive vision of the world’s trajectory toward global tolerance and pluralism is a secular utopian myth.

Ultimately any remaining exaltation of liberal utopianism is a matter of secular faith. Some will surely attempt to cast their faith as optimistic confidence in the capacity of human reason to overcome the primitive barbarism of our animal condition, but such a subtle difference in framing cannot cover up the apparent mysticism of liberal millenarianism.

As the age of reason comes to a close the only reasonable prediction left is that by John Gray in his book Black Mass. As the project of globalization fails to deliver its promise of universal economic and political liberation from the hardships and barbarity of the human condition, succumbing to the laws of entropy, the human experience will again be characterized by a resurgence of fundamentalist religion, superstition, and allegiance to mythology as a last ditch effort to maintain any sense of order and direction and meaning and purpose in our existence.

I still find happiness, contentment, and solace in my loved ones, in music, in beauty and art and literature, in exploring the wilderness, in pluralism, and in the catharsis of writing; but my faith in human reason has been eclipsed by the swell of fear and barbarity around the world, paired with the fervent but unfounded insistence from the left that “this too will pass” and the arc of progress will once again and necessarily take route. I will continue to do everything in my power to protect and assist people and the nonhuman world in need; to take responsibility and act for good reasons; to live ethically. I will continue to write and speak out and petition and defend what I believe to be justified and right. But liberals, now more evident than ever, cannot take progress for granted. When we assume that progress in ethics is guaranteed or inevitable—the natural and righteous evolution of humanity—and that this is just a hiccup—we’re no better than the mystics of the ancient world for whom reason had little value.